Valve please fix
But we have to oppose CollectiveShout as well, as in destroy them. They’re way worse than I thought
Make your own payment processor, Gaben. It’s the way.
Is that kinda what PayPal is, or was intended to be?
PayPal is almost as pornphobic as MastercardVisa
Yeah but PayPal’s awful. They literally arbitrarily deny you access to your own funds. At least the banks have rules.
If someone wants to pay me something they can use it literally anything other than PayPal. I don’t trust them they’ve stolen money from me before.
I don’t trust them they’ve stolen money from me before
Same. They stole a small amount (~10 USD), but at that time that was 2-3 days worth of groceries where I live (which would have helped a lot)
Then people would have to get specific cards or crypto or whatever that aren’t Visa/MasterCard in order to buy Steam games. That, of course, is if you can get banks to agree to carry “Steam cards”. Either that, or everyone would need to buy Steam gift cards as an exclusive form of payment.
All of these are much less convenient than keeping your existing debit/credit card to pay for Steam games, and less convenience means less sales.
Or you could just transfer funds to a steam card, then with that, but all you want.
Steam does not have to only accept steampay. Tho? You fear visa and mastercard will blaclist steam?
Steam removed games because visa and mastercard threatened to blaclist it, so yeah. That’s the whole point.
Yeah, but SteamPay is the future
I wish it was feasible to hve a large scale boycott of visa and mastercard. american express is already useless so it wouldn’t help much to include it…
Or a decentralized alternative that isn’t just used to scam people, that doesn’t eat up insane amounts of electricity to process, and is as convenient as regular money.
In reality, private corporations should not have control over money at all. Money is printed by the local government and should be controlled by the local government. Governments generally have better free speech protections than private corporations, which have none. Obviously, free speech protections are not universal, but countries can already ban content in other ways.
Money is not printed by the local government at all. Money is created by private banks through extending credit. And it shouldn’t be controlled by the government either, that’s a terrible idea.
I agree with the rest though.
Alternatives are not so hard, if you allow everyone to exchange and use every currency. Then, well, you need to pay someone selling in currency A - you pay your B’s to buy some A’s and you pay with them.
But there are lots of limitations on banking, some in good faith, and some to prevent mobility and make everything tracked. Possibility to track means possibility to decide who gets to do what.
I think that’s why gold standard was dropped in the first place. When all money is guaranteed with gold, and gold (still does) buy money, you do have a universal currency hard to track.
With decentralized electronic currencies the problem is - you need consensus. There’s no way around it at all. You can devise something to separate one consensus into a tree of subspaces, to make it more efficient in case an operation with a coin “123456” depends only on operations with coins from “123*” subspace, or something like that. Partitioned system. So then you don’t need consensus on subspaces untouched by your operation. But you still can’t have such an offline currency, because that depends on the finite amount of gold, while with electronic currencies double spending exists.
And I don’t know if it’s possible to make such an electronic currency anonymous for outside spectators. Zero-knowledge and other buzzwords are good, but I don’t know how one can do this.
Need to petition Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and American Express. I don’t think trying to get Valve to reverse these recent changes will necessarily be effective, since they are being pressured by the payment processors and they definitely aren’t going to risk not being able to effectively do business at all.
The petition is directed at Visa and MasterCard. I’m not sure why the article says it’s a petition directed at Steam, because it’s not.
Yeah, nah.
Petition these people:
https://www.collectiveshout.org/partners
Collective Shout is sustained by a small number of Australian partners. These are not big groups, and would quickly pull funding under any sort of pressure.
Collective Shout has a deep history with Christofascism and TERFs, so highlighting those angles is the way to go to get them pariahed. Once CS is out of the picture, we can work on undoing the damage they did.
It’s the height of stupidity to try to pressure collective shout.
You don’t tell the child to stop drawing on the wall for the 20th time and expect it to work.
You take it’s crayons away so it can’t anymore.
You fix the tool of abuse so it can’t be abused.
I think the idea is to pressure the partners of Collective Shout, per the url in the comment. Those might not necessarily agree with what they’re doing in this case, and if they see it’s making waves, reconsider their partnership.
Petitioning people to do something that is against their entire purpose doesn’t seem like it would be effective.
Not only that, they’ll get louder claiming they’re being oppressed. Ignore them.
Archived page: https://archive.ph/Ttyr5
Just in case.
i would expect the multi billionaire owners of the largest gaming platform on PC to have the ability to not fold like paper mache. I can also be mad at payment processors and valve at the same time
Valve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.
Banks and payment processors are the single largest most powerful forces in a capitalist market.
You literally do NOT get bigger. Full stop.
Valve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.
Few quick searches around the internet says that (measured by revenue) Mastercard alone is roughly 3 times bigger than Valve. So even if Valve is pretty big player it’s not even close on major payment processors. And they’re not playing on the same rules either, any payment processor can vanish payments for anyone with just ‘fuck you, that’s why’ -reasoning buried in their contracts. There’s almost no one who could afford to fight with them even in theory and much less in practise.
Kinda hard to stay at the top if you literally get blacklisted from doing financial transactions. Big as they are, they’re nowhere near the same level as the payment processors.
Under what arguments would we be able to push back on something like this? Most people would agree that these games where distasteful so arguing for them to be put back to not start a slippery slope isn’t that easy it seems.
See, THAT is not the slippery slope. STARTING to ban ANYTHING at all from legal transactions is the slippery slope. What happens when they decide R-rated films are distasteful? Or birth control?
Payment processors should have ABSOLUTELY no role in making ANY decisions about what legal transactions they process. Period.
Mainly that the companies controlling nearly all digital financial transactions across the entire globe should not be the arbiters of what is morally acceptable. If they must exist at all, they should just be handling the transfer of funds regardless of what is being bought and sold*.
*illegal shit would not be protected.
They are parasitic middle men that don’t need to exist in the first place, though.
I would go further and say they shouldn’t have the ability to block any transaction consumers are making, regardless of legality.
I basically want them classified like utilities (or the Internet), and the money they’re processing should operate like digital networked cash. If I hand you a dollar bill, it doesn’t arbitrarily decide to stop being money if it thinks the transaction might possibly be even tangentially related to crime. That’s how you end up with these corporations becoming so invasive in the first place, with their overbroad policies blocking entire groups/categories from being in the economy.
Don’t think that I’m pro-crime – but only actual crime is crime. A transfer of funds itself is only sometimes a crime. You don’t see the federal reserve trying to foil small-time drug deals in cash, and for good reason – legitimate crimes should be investigated by law enforcement, not “prevented” at the whims of overeager corpos. It’s not the payment processor’s right or responsibility to prevent or they to predict crime, especially once they’ve built such a system as to become indispensable for most of us. If they are allowed to do that they will always do it the easy way – blanket bans with massive collateral damage to non-criminals.
These companies should be disbanded and their systems should be handed over to the public. Hot take, I know, but I’m of the mind that transaction processing (much like air and water) should not be privatized. You may think at this point that I’m a crypto-head, but not really. It seemed promising at one point and may be still, but now it’s perhaps permanently associated with unsavory types. I’ll use it if it fits the purpose, but expecting the general public to use it as money is insanity. Crypto brought us part of the way there, but such a system can’t really flourish in furtherance of the public good in the current environment – even disregarding the bad PR.
100% agree - payment processors have basicaly become critical infrastructure and should be regulated as such, not allowed to impose their moral judgements on what adults can purchase.
Absolutely. I’d switch to other payment methods that aren’t those, if you can.
deleted by creator
*illegal shit would not be protected.
They can push for some law that makes certain groups or their depictions illegal. Then it’s their morals becoming a law.
If there’scorruptionlobbying, there’s a way for them to twist “immoral” into “illegal”, which is fucked.Yeah but that is a whole other can of worms. I am against legal bribery, as well as certain things being illegal. Like drugs. Or most porn. But I also think slavery, CP, bestiality, nuclear weapons, etc should be illegal to buy, sell, or even produce.
If they are dealing in US currency then the wording on the bill says it all. Legal tender for a debts public and private. When they print currency they don’t say, “and this one can’t be used for porn.”
Don’t give em any ideas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1r5VtCUwPw
Show people that game that was delisted because of them. The idea that they only took down pornographic games is wrong, they went after things that didn’t fit their christofash narrative.
“Hi there, would you like to sign the petition?”
Signed, thanks for the link <3
